Naked, you are simple as one of your hands,
smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round:
you have moon-lines, apple-pathways:
naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.
Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba;
you have vines and stars in your hair;
naked, you are spacious and yellow
as summer in a golden church.
Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails--
curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born
and you withdraw to the underground world,
as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores:
your clear light dims, gets dressed--drops its leaves--
and becomes a naked hand again.
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Come with me, I said, and no one knew
where, or how my pain throbbed,
no carnations or barcaroles for me,
only a wound that love had opened.
I said it again: Come with me, as if I were dying,
and no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth
or the blood that rose into the silence.
0 Love, now we can forget the star that has such thorns!
That is why, when I heard your voice repeat
Come with me, it was as if you had let loose
the grief, the love, the fury of a cork-trapped wine
that geysers flooding from deep in its vault:
in my mouth I felt the taste of fire again,
of blood and carnations, of rock and scald.
The light that rises from your feet to your hair,
the strength enfolding your delicate form,
are not mother-of-pearl, not chilly silver:
you are made of bread, a bread the fire adores.
The grain grew high in its harvest, in you,
in good time the flour swelled;
as the dough rose, doubling your breasts,
my love was the coal waiting ready in the earth.
Oh, bread your forehead, your legs, your mouth,
bread I devour, born with the morning light,
my love, beacon-flag of the bakeries:
fire taught you a lesson of the blood;
you learned your holiness from flour,
from bread your language and aroma.
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If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,
not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,
oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is --
sand, time, the tree of the rain,
everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.
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